Behind the Social Marketing of ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’

This weekend, the film “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” will try to hold on to its No. 1 position at the box office as it battles new titles “The Help,” “30 Minutes or Less” and “Final Destination 5.” The hybrid live action/CGI-thriller grossed $54.8 million its opening weekend, boosted by good reviews and a strong viral campaign designed by creative company Mekanism.

To raise the film’s profile online, Mekanism both targeted a group of 50 social media influencers as well as released a series of short “real ape” videos they hoped would go viral. The former campaign began back in June, when Mekanism reached out to selected YouTube stars and movie-bloggers to help them build buzz — especially among millenial-age males.

According to Tommy Means, Mekanism’s founder and director, plugged-in audiences nowadays don’t recommend films to their friends because they like a certain brand. “It’s because they like their friends,” he says, adding that online communities look to influencers because they see them, accurately or not, as their friends. “Our job then becomes to impress and wow the influencers,” he says.

The process is less expensive that buying impressions, says Mekanism President and Executive Producer Jason Harris, but harder than simply making a media buy. “You have to really convince these guys to want to carry out your message,” he says.

To complement their outreach to the “Rise 50,” as Mekanism dubbed their influencers, the company also released a series of short videos of apes doing intelligent things. The videos were credited to the Twentieth Century Fox Resarch Library and were the result of the marketers realizing they wouldn’t have any real film footage to work from, given the effects-heavy film’s tight post-production schedule.

Mekanism launched the first video, of a a chimp playing a video game, roughly six weeks ago, but it wasn’t until the fourth video, of an ape holding an AK-47, that the campaign took off. The AK-47 video has since been watched nearly 13 million times.

Having never worked on a film campaign before, Means says he was intrigued by the inner-workings of the “Apes” roll-out, from the amount of market research the studio did to their strict messaging. A week before the film came out, he says, Fox’s Chief Marketing Officer Oren Aviv told them explicitly not to put out any material that didn’t imply the film was an all-adrenaline action adventure movie.

“Movie marketers typically don’t work worth traditional [advertising] agencies,” says Means, who adds that the experience was different from what they were expecting. “We tried to write a brief for this and when we presented it to Fox, they were like, ‘What is this’?” he says.

“When we asked if there was a larger message for the brand, we were told that whatever we do, our job was to help sell tickets,” says Harris. “If you don’t sell tickets, it’s over.”